[XML-SIG] Re: XML Filesystem

[Ken MacLeod]

dkuhlman@enterpriselink.com (Dave Kuhlman) writes:
> Please let me add my support and requests along these lines -- To
> make XML most useful to me, it would provide the following:

  [please refer to original message, a mere snip just won't do]

Several of the features you mention are similar to what we're trying
to do in the Casbah project <http://www.ntlug.org/casbah/>.

Casbah is intended to be a language agnostic scripting environment
with a persistent store and APIs for communicating using CORBA or
similar remote object calls.

Casbah features a hierarchical persistent store (think nested
dictionaries and lists, with the dictionaries able to take a ``class''
attribute), a language agnostic runtime(s) closely integrated to the
store, a GUI front-end, and HTTP, CORBA, and CORBA-like APIs for
communicating between parts of the system.

The hierarchy is actually distributed, we're using a design patterned
after virtual file systems -- multiple persistent stores can be
``mounted'' in your namespace, as well as web and ftp servers, virtual
drivers, the local filesystem, etc.

In addition to using XML extensively for interfacing, I'm also working
on having XML object classes similar to what XML::Grove has.
Basically you could have a directory in the hierarchy that contains
XML documents or fragments underneath it just by virtue of their being
XML objects.  By coincidence, I'm hoping sometime in the next few
weeks to get an example ``virtual driver'' that reads an XML document
using XML::Grove and make it available via the Casbah API.

 -- Ken